Jul
20
I’m as proud a Mac owner as you’ll find and a long-term defender of the faith, but that doesn’t mean I won’t call out Mac media for using math to spin the story. The headline at Macworld reads Apple’s Macintosh market share soars 16 percent. The details (I’ve added the emphasis):
With Mac shipments rising from 655,000 to 760,000 year-over-year for the second quarter, Apple’s U.S. market jumped from 4.4 percent in 2005 to 4.8 percent in 2006 — a double-digital growth of 16 percent, according to market research firm IDC.
Apple is definitely on a roll, but, at least to my admittedly math-challenged mind, an increase from 4.4 to 4.8 per cent seems more like a nudge than a soar.
TAGS: JOURNALISM, MATH, SPIN
Good points, Mr King. Take your pick as to the cause: a math-challenged writer, sloppy subbing, deadline in ten minutes, mixing up the conclusions of the two market research firms, or any combination of the above.
I don’t like that “double-digital”, either. The writer must mean “double digit” growth. Journalists, eh? What can you do with ‘em?
Mea culpa: I’d have to opt for the calclator.
Unbelievable. The 16 percent figure refers the increase in unit sales as reported by IDC, but market share rose around 9 percent. (I’d use percent here; Apple’s share is so small that a dramatic increase in overall share would still look tiny if measured in percentage points). The reporter confused the two, and the editors didn’t catch it before publishing. All it would take to catch the error is a glance at the piece by someone who can do simple math in their head, or has a calculator handy.
What’s barely mentioned is whether the year-over-year change in unit sales is really telling of a trend towards Apple kit. It’s a volatile market where sales fluctuate rapidly according to product introductions. There’s one mention of the new Intel boxes driving sales. So what’s really going on — people in the Mac’s existing market picking up some speedy new hardware, or a real shift?
That’s probably too critical of a question to expect the Mac press–which tends towards advocacy over reporting–to answer.
And as the venerable Bill Walsh would point out: are we talking percentage or percentage points?